Category: Data

Canada: Not Quite as Good as It Looks in OECD Comparisons

On Monday, Statscan put out a “Portrait of Youth and Education in Canada,” which includes the following graph accompanied by a note to the effect that Canada has one of the highest post-secondary attainment rates in the world because of our high community colleges/polytechnic participation rates. It was accompanied by the following graph: Figure 1: Highest Level of Educational Attainment, 25 to 34-year-olds, Canada and OECD average 2019, as per Statistics Canada Now, I know this line of argument. I

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Inter-provincial Differences in Borrowing and Debt

I recently published some time series data on student debt in Canada, to wit: Figure 1: Average Student Debt at Graduation, Various Sources in constant $2021, Canada, 1982-2021 *indicates data from the Canada University Consortium; otherwise data is from the National Graduates’ Survey As is often the case, national figures obscure provincial differences. So today I wanted to put some data out there to provide those nuanced regional figures. Let’s start with the issue of annual borrowing.  In Figures 2

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20 Years of Data on Canadian Undergraduate Students – Part 1

Co-authored with Tiffany MacLennan Last week, I examined undergraduate student debt using data from the triennial survey of graduating students undertaken by the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC).  Today and tomorrow, along with Tiffany MacLennan (one of HESA’s many rockstar analysts), I am going to put that same data source to use to look at other aspects of university financing. So, just to remind everyone: CUSC is a 20-something year-old coalition of the willing, which is roughly 30-odd institutions who

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Education at a Glance 2021

On Thursday, the OECD released its annual Education at a Glance report.  I always do a blog post about these, even though, let’s face it, very little changes annually.  But I have zero desire to talk about this godforsaken election anymore, so this seems like a welcome opportunity to change the subject a bit. Let’s start with Figure 1, tertiary attainment rates, where Canada always performs well.  This shows Canada as having one of the highest tertiary attainment rates in

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